


Something's wrong when you regret (things that haven't happened yet)

by Demonfeathers



Category: Death Note
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Fix-It, Headaches & Migraines, M/M, not sure where this is going yet
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-10
Updated: 2016-04-28
Packaged: 2018-05-19 12:19:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5967241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Demonfeathers/pseuds/Demonfeathers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Light dies with blood in his mouth in a warehouse in 2010. He wakes up in bed in 2004.<br/>Well. It would be boring to do the same thing twice, wouldn't it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a dumb little thing I started ages ago and finally scraped together enough of to post a chapter. Not sure where I'm taking it yet or for how far, but we'll see. It's been years since I read Deathnote, so please feel free to point out any major inconsistencies.

Light wakes in the bed he shares with L and knows that something is wrong.

Normally he wakes all at once, awareness snapping into place almost as soon as his eyes are open. Today his mind turns over sluggishly, and for a second the dim white ceiling doesn’t compute–he’s not sure what should be there, but it’s not that. Then the softly suffocating feeling hits him properly and he bolts up, rolling over and coughing in alarm. Blood sprays across his pillow in a fine mist, and there’s a faint clinking beside him as L jerks awake at his movement.

A large drop of blood falls on the pillow, followed quickly by another, and Light realizes his nose is bleeding. Bleeding rather a lot, actually, and he reaches up to pinch it shut on autopilot. He coughs again, blood clogging his throat, and wonders a bit abstractly how much of it he’s swallowed in his sleep. He feels rather ill.

 “I did not know that Light-kun was prone to nosebleeds.”

“I’m not.” Light swallows and tries not to actually sway with the wave of indecipherable emotion that rocks through him at the sound of L’s voice. _Like I just heard it yesterday._ His thoughts are fogged. He _did_ just hear it yesterday.

He forces himself into motion. “Bathroom,” he mutters thickly, holding his nose with his cuffed hand. L says nothing, just scrambles down from the bed and follows him.

In the bathroom, Light gingerly removes his hand and examines his face in the mirror. A sluggish line of blood trickles from his nose, but it seems mostly done now. It shows up very starkly against his too-pale face, dark smudges under his eyes highlighting how bloodshot they look.

“Light-kun does not seem to have slept well.” L is slouched in the doorway, watching him carefully.

Light ignores the tight feeling in his chest, the unease that sweeps through him. Something about this all is _wrong wrong wrong_. “Not particularly,” he manages, dabbing away the blood on his upper lip and bending over to wash his face in the sink. He feels so, so tired.

By the time he and L have joined the rest of the team and started work for the day, Light feels like there is a weight on his head, dragging it down and making it hard to sit up straight. There is an uncomfortable pang starting behind his right eye, and it takes a great deal of concentration to focus on the computer in front of him. The florescent lighting is making him squint.

“Light, are you ok? You seem a bit peaked.” Light’s father is staring at him, concerned. Light waves him off. “Fine. Just slept badly. Headache.”

Soichiro still looks concerned, but goes back to work, glancing over at his son periodically.

“It is true that Light-kun is looking a bit under the weather, today. Perhaps you would prefer to lay down for a bit?” L is perched on the chair across from Light, staring at him with his head tilted to the side like a bird. For a brief moment in his mind’s eye, L has a wreath wrapped around his neck, white roses against dark leaves. Light blinks. His vision is shaking, literally- he feels like he’s watching a movie and someone is tilting the camera back and forth. He grabs the edges of the table to try to still it. It doesn’t work.

“I-“ He swallows. Closes his eyes. “Maybe that would be a good idea,” he says, very precisely. He realizes that he is listing very slightly to the right. His right eye feels like someone has lit a fire behind it; he wonders if maybe he’s dead after all. Is this what waits for people who kill with the Deathnote? He feels the weight of every name he’s ever written, tugging at his neck, hooked behind his right eye, pulling him towards the floor, tipping, tipping. Deathnote?  But he’s not killed–L is right there, not dead–not yet–he stands up.

Crumples sideways.

There are alarmed shouts, yowling through Light’s head like someone drove an icepick into his skull. He hears a whine coming from his throat without any personal input or ability to stifle it, a release valve for the pressure pounding behind his eye. He curls up with his hands digging into the sides of his head, fisting in his hair. His eyes are screwed shut. Nausea pounds through him in time with the beat of his pulse, bile rising to the back of his throat as his jaw locks tight. His head is going to crack in half, splintering deep inside where he can’t reach to claw the rot out. He’s seen images of limbs gone gangrenous, split open with their own foulness. Surely this is what that feels like, because the alternative is that someone has _actually_ managed to shove a red hot fire poker into his eye without him noticing, and that’s not possible, even now-

Someone shouts right next to his ear, and now that strangled whine breaks free from him, high and desperate with pain as he curls up even tighter, stomach turning. The noise abruptly backs off, replaced with Light’s own harsh breathing. Someone has a hand on his back, rubbing between his shoulder blades.

“Light. Light, talk to me. What’s wrong? Do I need to call an ambulance?”

Light thinks of the harsh lights and noise of the emergency room and nearly throws up right then and there. “No,” he manages to grit out, barely audible. “Head hurts. Don’t.”

“What do you need? What’s wrong?”

“It looks like it may be a migraine. Is your son prone to them? He had a nosebleed this morning.” L’s voice seems to come from some indeterminate point behind him. Light is suddenly frantic with the need to place him, to have him in sight where Light can see what he’s doing. _Don’t let him catch you off guard. Watch him._ Light rolls over, crouching with his knees under him and his forehead pressed to the floor, hands still clutching his hair. He forces them to relax, to put his hands down and push himself up. Bad idea. Light tilts sideways again as he clamps a hand over his eye, the way you would clutch a wound. He went down on one elbow.

“Light, can you stand? We’re going to move you into the bedroom, ok? It’ll be dark there, come on.”

Hands under his arms, hauling him upright. The world shakes again. Light sags sideways, trying to get his balance. His father stands next to him, hooking Light’s free arm over his shoulder and steering him towards the door. Light stumbles with him, feeling the chain go tight and tug his hand away from his face a bit as L maneuvers around them to keep the chain from tripping them. He clamps his hand down tighter and focuses on walking straight without throwing up.

Eventually they make it to the bedroom and Soichiro gently sits him on the edge of the bed. As soon as he lets go, Light lets himself crash sideways like a cut tree. He can feel Soichiro taking his shoes off and lifting his legs onto the bed, but couldn’t find the energy to do more than crack his good eye open to watch his father blearily.

“What can I get you, Light? What do you need?”

“…bucket.”

He can see L, standing over his father’s shoulder, reach down to pick something up and pass it forward. A waste bin is held in front of him. Light manages to lever himself upright enough to take the bin and lean over it, right eye squeezed shut.

“What’s wrong with your eye?” _Too loud, too loud._ His father is hovering at his side, clearly unsure what to do.

“Can’t focus. Hurts.” Light is saved from further attempts at conversation by his stomach suddenly reaching its breaking point. He buries his face in the bin, arms trembling as he heaves. There is whispered conversation over his head. Light rests his forehead against the arm holding the bucket upright and pants. The chain clinks as L moves. There is the sound of water running in the bathroom, and more hushed conversation in front of him. He blinks, tilting his head to look up. L is on the phone, turned away from him.

Soichiro comes back into the room holding a damp washcloth. He holds it out to Light. Light levers himself up enough to take it with the hand not holding the trashcan, squeezing his eye shut tight and wiping his mouth shakily.

“I’ll get you some water,” Soichiro said, walking away again. L finishes his conversation on the phone, turning around to face Light again, who is finding it harder and harder to sit upright. His ribs ache sharply, feeling shattered beneath his skin. Every pant sends phantom pain arching through them. “Watari is going to bring up some supplies,” he says softly. Light squints at him through the eye that can actually focus, keeping the other shut. L is hard to make out in the dim light of the room (thank god- light was becoming more intolerable by the second) but it seems like there might actually be concern in those too-wide eyes. Light is reminded of how L’s eyes had widened as he died. He squeezed his eyes back shut, slumping over the trashcan again. L was right in front of him. When had he died? _November 5 th_. No. It wasn’t November yet, it hadn’t happened yet. Was it going to? It was a dream, just a fever dream. _You can’t dream the feeling of bullets shattering your ribs_. Ryuk, standing over him with a pen dwarfed in his claws, ever-present grin on his face.

Light threw up again.

There is an extremely irritating noise somewhere by his right ear. He lets himself whimper very softly, hoping to convince whoever was making the noise to stop it. It doesn’t. He is vaguely aware that if his mind were any less of a burning chasm right now, he would hate himself for making such noises. Right now all that matters is trying physically hold his skull together with his hands before it finishes splitting down the right side.

Soichiro walks back into the room with Watari, who is carrying a tray with a large glass of water and a few bottles of pills. He sets it on the side table next to Light and leaves as quietly as he came, returning a moment later with a new waste bin to replace the one Light was wrapped around. As Watari coaxes him to let go of it, Light realizes that the noise had been coming from the handcuff chain rattling against the side of the bin; he was shaking. Watari offers him the other trashcan, but Light manages to shake his head slightly; he was done for now. It gets placed on the ground beside the bed. Soichiro steps up to help Light drink some water, washing the taste from his mouth and swallowing a couple of the pain relievers Soichiro shook out in his palm.

“I’ll let you sleep it off, then, ok Light? Let me know if you need anything.” He stroked Light’s hair away from his forehead in a gesture he hadn’t made since Light was little and sick with the flu. Startling himself, Light leans into it. He hadn’t had such a genuine gesture of comfort from someone in years. Years? _Years_.

Light lays back down and curls in on himself, nursing his aching head. Memories that hadn’t happened yet swirl in his head and his right eye threatens to explode if he doesn’t keep his hand clamped over it, as though holding it in place. He feels someone arranging the blankets over him, and then the brief flare of light from the doorway as the door opened and closed. There was a soft rattle in the darkness and an answering shift from the cuff around his wrist as L moved around to the other side of the bed. It dipped under his weight as he climbed on.

Time slipped away, warping and twisting. He was dead on the floor of a warehouse in 2010. He was curled up in bed next to a man who died in less than a year. He was a god, he was a seventeen year old boy. 23. Boy? Man. His chest hurt; it was a phantom pain echoed by the pain in his head. Or was it the pain in his head that wasn’t real? Ryuk’s laughter echoed through his head–it didn’t matter whether he was really here or not, Ryuk was sure to be laughing somewhere. His muscles ached in a sort of bone deep way that said he was still shaking. Light couldn’t tell. He could hear from the way his breath was stuttering (so loud so loud so loud _not as loud as the rattle of his last breath had been_ who’s last breath _L’s startled gasp bullets under his skin their hearts stuttering in their chests_ ) that his teeth were chattering.

There is a hesitant pressure between his shoulder blades. Light shakes spasmodically as L slowly starts to rub circles into the knotted muscles along his spine. At first it’s worse, too intense, every little pressure screaming down over-tightened nerves, but after a moment it’s as though a dam released, coolness flooding through the muscles L was slowly putting more pressure on. Light took a shuddering breath, shoulders relaxing ever so slightly. L’s other hand joined the first, handcuff chain brushing Light’s back as he pushed his thumbs into the sides of Light’s spine.

They stay like that for a long time; L slowly rubbing Light’s shoulders while Light’s trembling eased to a stop and the lance of rotting fire in his head dimmed marginally. Memories tripped over themselves; like someone took a neatly order bookcase and tipped it over onto the floor. Ripped fragments scattering out across his mind.

Eventually, he slips into sleep.

 

Light wakes in the bed he shares with L and knows that something is wrong.

It is the beginning of October, 2004. His arm is chained to L Lawliet, who died in November, 2004. Years ago. A month from now. Light can taste the blood and bile in his mouth as the memories unspool, coming easy now, no longer cracking his head apart from the force. He is Kira, and he ruled the world for six years before that white haired brat finally got the best of him. He died, and that should have been the end of it. There is no afterlife for those who use the Deathnote. It should have been over.

But instead he is here, in the past, lying next to his long lost enemy. The only one who could ever keep up with him turn for turn.

Light doesn’t understand. Why now? What is it about this point in time? If being tossed back into the past were ever in the books, Light would have assumed that he would return to before he picked up the Deathnote in the first place. Is it because this is a period of time when he no longer remembered being Kira, originally? Because he doesn’t possess either of the Notes right now? But if so, why a month before he gets them back? Why not right after he gave up the Deathnote? He has too many questions and not enough answers, and a sneaking suspicion that answers are not going to be forthcoming any time soon.

In the meantime–now what?

He’s in the past. L is alive, and Light _knows his name_. He still has that scrap of paper hidden in his watch, he could pull it out and write down L’s name and be done with it, right here and now. Get his victory a month early. Except, would it be a victory? It feels a bit like cheating, using future knowledge like that. At least the first time around, he knew he’d outmaneuvered L fair and square–as fair and square as this battle of wills had ever been between them, anyway. He’d won. And then he’d lost. And didn’t that just rankle, that Near of all people got to watch him at his lowest moment? But it hadn’t happened yet. And if Light had anything to say about it, it never would.

Which brought him back around to the question of what to do with all these memories that had been so unceremoniously shoved in his head. He was armed with the knowledge of what to do and say in order to secure L’s death and set himself up as the God of the New World, and with his foreknowledge he could no doubt outmaneuver Near and Mello both. They’d never get their act together in time to take him out again, and he could spend the intervening years making sure that loose end was properly taken care of, should he so wish.

Did he so wish?

The problem with that path was simply that he knew exactly what would happen. A boon, to be sure, but it also meant that there would be no challenges. Light would take over and do what he’d done for the last six years and he’d play his role to perfection, but he’d never be done with it. He’d be bored out of his mind within the year. Light was, if nothing else, at least honest with himself, and he knew he’d never be happy with it. He hadn’t been in the future, after all; the battle with Near and Mello had been something to keep himself occupied with, it was engaging, but it wasn’t enjoyable. They weren’t L, and he’d cursed them for it. L was irritating, but he was _interesting_ , and Light had been bored to tears in the years after his death.

He’d woken up here, and now, for a purpose. What purpose, whose purpose, he had no idea, but here he was nonetheless. It seemed rather pointless to get a second chance at life and spend it doing all the exact same things he’d done the first time. Surely the point of such things was not just to do things better and faster, but to do something _new_?

It certainly had the potential to alleviate some of that perpetual boredom that had plagued him the last years, and if it went wrong, well, he wouldn’t need Rem to kill L this time.

 

Light supposes that he should probably get up properly, if for no other reason than to go remove whatever dead animal crawled into his mouth last night. He grimaced, stretching subtly beneath the blankets still piled on him, and paused. There was a hand on his back.

In fact, now that he’s paying attention, he could feel L curled up just behind him, hands still resting against his back from where he’d rubbed the tension out of his locked up muscles before Light fell asleep. It’s probably the reason Light was able to fall asleep, actually–the migraine had hit him hard and fast, and he had been in no way prepared to managed the pain. He winced, remembering the weakness he’d shown, but there was nothing he could do about it now except try for damage control. Perhaps it would even endear him a bit to L; it may have already, judging by the L’s impromptu massage.

Did he want to endear himself to L? Yes, he decided. If he was going to be exploring new avenues, he might as well go all the way and set a proper challenge for himself. Let’s start a new game. Let’s see what could have been, what could be.

With that in mind, step one.

Light stretches again, more fully this time, rolling his shoulders so that they popped and released the last residual tension. L was definitely awake by now, but he hadn’t moved yet. Light rolled over onto his back so that he could turn his head comfortably to see L.

L’s eyes were open, wide and dark with those permanent black bags under them. Light viciously controlled his breathing to keep it from hitching, remembering the last time he’d seen those eyes. It didn’t matter. He was here, and now, and so was L, and he was going to make sure neither of them were ever bored again.

“Thank you,” he said. L’s eyes widened further.

“Oh? Whatever for, Light-kun?”

“For helping me, last night. I doubt I’d have been able to sleep for a very long time, without it. You could have left it to Watari’s painkillers and been done with it, but you didn’t. Thank you.” Light’s voice is soft, and he’s trying to be careful not to breath too much on L, as he’s sure his breath must be atrocious. L’s staring intently at him, no doubt wondering at his sincerity.

“I am always happy to help a friend, Light-kun,” he settles on at last.

Light smiles, as sincerely as he’s able.

“In that vein, I would like to point out that Light-kun may wish to brush his teeth now, before the Japanese government decides to weaponized his breath and I never get to see my friend again as they drag him away to help fight Japan’s enemies with his admittedly impressive new ability.”

Light’s smile drops from his face. For a moment, he is torn between reaching for his watch for the slip of paper, damn the consequences, and, surprisingly, bursting into laughter. He had forgotten the power L had to rile him up, to catch him off guard with comments others wouldn’t have dared to make, or to phrase that way. He settles on throwing his hand over his face and groaning.

“Yes, L,” he says long sufferingly, “I’ll go brush my teeth now.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A brief interlude from L's POV. L has some adjustments to make.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realize timelines are probably royally fucked, sorry. It's been a while since I read these manga and I honestly can't be bothered to fix it.  
> Not sure if there's gonna be more of this. I didn't really have any idea where this was going beyond this.  
> Sorry for typos.

L watches this new version of Light Yagami sitting across from him in the investigation room. It has been over a week since Light’s dramatic collapse in front of the rest of the team. L has of course considered that it was staged, but he highly doubts it. The symptoms at the very least were real, and L would have noticed Light slipping any sort of drugs that may have induced them. It is Light’s change of attitude since then that has him concerned.

Oh, it’s nothing drastic enough that anyone else has noticed yet, but L can see it. Light is going out of his way to be patient with L, passing sweets and papers when asked, thanking L for things he wouldn’t have two weeks before, and then of course there’s the situation with Misa….

Light had spent two days after his migraine in mostly thoughtful silence, brushing off everyone’s inquiries into his health, and then took Misa Amane aside and quietly broke up with her.

Or, well, Light was quiet, anyway. Misa was most assuredly _not_.

Light had lined up a whole host of reasonable explanations, not least of which was his own continuing suspicion in the Kira case, stating a wish to remove her from such an unsavory situation as much as possible. Misa did not go without a fight, but after several fraught and loud hours of arguing and crying and screaming later, go she did.

L is rather curious why  Light has kept her around this long only to let her go now, because concern certainly isn’t the answer, but Light’s been tightlipped about it and he can’t bring it up in front of the rest of the team without everyone glaring at him for digging at a ‘sore subject’. So he’s left with observation, as always.

In the meantime, Light seems to have dismissed the rest of the team even more thoroughly than usual and focused the brunt of his attention on L himself. Oh, he pays lip service to the investigation, as ever, but L catches the way Light’s eyes focus on his reflection in the computer screens rather than the reports on the screens. When the rest of the team goes home for the evening, and L drops all pretenses to stare at Light and study his behavior instead, now Light does the same. Where before he would have grit his teeth in annoyance and ignored L, now he drops his sheath of reports to his lap and stares back, calmly, calculatingly. L informs him of his rising percentage, and Light nods solemnly rather than snapping angrily.

This is not to say that Light’s temper has disappeared, of course. Simply that he has stopped bothering to show anger at these things. Something has shifted in the game between them, and Light has decided that showing anger at these things is no longer worth the energy the emotional response costs.

Truth be told, this worries L more than anything else so far. If Light is changing his behavior this much so late in the game, and doesn’t care that L sees it, it can only be bad. It means it doesn’t matter how much L’s suspicions are raised. Light has a new play and it doesn’t rely on as much plausible deniability. L does not like the thought of that at _all_.

However, to return to an earlier point of data, Light is also apparently trying to appease L in some minor way. He is dropping parts of his masks, but he appears to be picking up new ones in their place, and L is baffled as to their purpose. He and Light both know that he knows Light is Kira; he simply can’t prove it. What purpose does trying to avoid confrontation and small attempts at smoothing ruffled feathers serve at this point in the game? Does he think passing the sugar without argument is going to make L somehow sympathetic to him? That would imply that rather than a new ace up his sleeve, Light is trying to soften his own fate should L catch him.

But if L were really that close to catching him, Light would not be nearly so calm. It doesn’t fit his psych profile at all. None of these new pieces are fitting together properly. It’s as though Light woke up a different person after that migraine. None of his previously established behaviors are fitting properly anymore.

L briefly considers the idea that Light did wake up a different person after his migraine. A change in personality like that isn’t technically impossible, and to discount anything now is potentially fatal.

It may, L is forced to concede in the privacy of his own head, be fatal anyway. Light, for all his baffling changes, is acting with a sort of casual assurance that he has the winning hand and is simply waiting for an opportune moment to lay it out. In the middle of the night, curled up beside his potential murderer with the chain between them warmed by their body heat under the covers, he admits that it is becoming a distinctly possible ending to their game.

He worries his thumbnail between his teeth as Light shifts in his sleep and rolls over, tangling slightly in the chain as he does so. He slits his eyes open, growling softly in annoyance, and untwists it with somewhat sleep-clumsy arms before settling the cuff more comfortably around his wrist and closing his eyes again. The moments stretch out, and L thinks Light has fallen back asleep when his eyes crack open again, squinting at L.

“What’er you still awake?” he slurrs, his usual eloquence lost at 2:30 am. He blinks slowly.

“Just thinking, Light-kun. Go back to sleep.”

Light grunts, the sound rumbling in his throat for longer than it should as it turns into an almost animal sigh. He blinks slowly again, then reaches out and tugs L’s hand away from his mouth.

“Stop chewin’ your nails. ‘Sgusting,” he mutters, closing his eyes again. This time it only takes a few moments for his breath to even back out into true sleep.

He still has his hand draped over L’s, having not bothered to remove it. Maybe he forgot it was even there as soon as his immediate goal of getting L’s thumb out of his mouth was done. Light's cuff, warmed from his skin, is pressing into L’s wrist beside his own cuff. L watches the face that will most likely be the death of him for an endless moment, then ducks his head to press against their joined hands, skin-warm metal against the delicate skin of his eyelids. It’s not a very good position to be in; one of them could move in the middle of the night and end up poking a sharp edge of metal into his eye.

He doesn’t move for the rest of the night.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here, have a chapter of Light musing to himself while I try to justify the shifting goal posts and scrabble together some semblance of a direction for this piece of crap to go.  
> Where did the action and interaction go? No one knows. This is why DN fics suck to write; you have to spend at least 60% of them writing internal monologues if you want anything to make sense. Ugh.

Light doesn’t pay much attention to the Yotsuba investigation. It only matters in that it will reveal the existence of the Death Notes to L and the rest of the investigation team; until that happens, it deserves only minimal effort to keep up appearances. It isn’t even his Death Note, but he’ll find a way to fetch Ryuk’s Note back eventually. The trade-off of removing Misa from the equation as much as possible; she can’t fetch the note back for him from wherever it’s been buried, but it gets Rem off his back for the moment.

L is watching him, if anything, even more closely than ever. Light spends a great deal of time watching him back. He’d nearly forgotten, surrounded by Near’s poor caricature for so long, what L was really like. All the frustration and exhilaration and ambition generated just from being pinned by that stupid raccoon mask stare. Near wanted to be L so badly, distorting all his quirks and habits into something pathetic. Near was L’s ghost, left to haunt him.

But now he had the real thing sitting in front of him again, a chance he never thought he’d have, and he’s loathe to waste it. Light has always had a rather, shall we say, obsessive personality. He knows this. He’s always used it to his advantage, before. But now his focus has settled on this new problem of how to live _with_ L rather than simply _outlive_ him, and he can’t seem to care about much else.

One day, he is going to lean over L’s shoulder and whisper his name into his ear, and watch the knowledge dawn that Light has _known_ , somehow, all this time, and yet not used it, and it is going to be every bit as delicious as watching L die was, the first time.

It will be the first stone laid on the groundwork Light is trying to set up. A new kind of triumph.

So, he turns the problem of Light-and-L rather than Light-v-L over in his mind, trying to sand down the sharp edges of their relationship bit by bit as he goes. Less animosity in little everyday interactions might not mean much here and now, but over time it’ll help lower the tension between them from outright hostility to at least banked resentment and suspicion, and give curiosity a chance to work L’s walls down just a bit. If he’s too busy wondering why Light is bothering to play the goody-two shoes card to him, he’s not busy thinking about how many layers of security he’ll need to install around the private prison cell he’ll make to throw Light in.

Light is very nearly giddy. He hasn’t had a proper challenge like this in _years_. This, truly, will be a mark of his true prowess. He’ll have to tweak a few things, but getting Bastion of Pseudo-Pacifist Righteousness L Lawliet to work together with the Bloody God of Justice Kira? Oh yes. _Much_ better than killing him.

Given the amount of time and attention he’s spending on this rather than his so-called job, he has come to a few conclusions.

First, removed from the infuriating distraction that is Near and his entourage, he can see that he had fallen into stagnation. This is, on the surface, obvious; finally, L, a challenge again, etc., etc.. Beneath that, Light had been… not evolving his tactics. When he picked up the Death Note, he was just coming out of high school. He was very much above his age level, but he expected himself to only continue climbing as he entered college and graduated with honors. Instead, he picked up the Death Note, and… stopped. Oh, he was exercising his intellect to its limit in the contest against L and those who would incarcerate him, but he wasn’t developing anymore. His methodology and structure for his new world order were rudimentary, meant to act as scaffolding to grow and develop organically as he shaped things from the ground up. Instead, all of his initial broad strokes planning stayed just that, and never seemed to gain any definition.

He is starting to find that very disturbing. He’s smarter than that, dammit. The plans of a seventeen year old were supposed to lay the groundwork for the man he would become, something build on, not the final product. He can try and blame it on his distraction by the game with L, but that should have only pushed him to new levels, not held him back. And once he’d won, he should have been able to move forward rather than stall out. There were years where Near wasn’t enough of a threat to count.

No, it started earlier than L. Even before Kira gained international attention, his ‘development’ seemed to mostly consist of going _bigger_ rather than more refined. It’s like he brought the Death Note home and made all these plans, and then just… stopped. No, not even that. He started making plans the moment he picked it up and read the rules, even before he wrote the first name. He already knew what he wanted to do with it, roughly, before he’d even proved its validity. And once he _had_ used it for the first time….

Here, and now, apparently disconnected from either Death Note while still retaining the _knowledge_ of them… it was disturbing. He’d never had the time or inclination to examine his behavior this way before, would never have dreamed of trying to fit someone else into his ideology. Looking for places it could bend without breaking and finding an unfinished structure instead was deeply uncomfortable. It meant he had much more work cut out for him than just changing L’s mind.

But, he thinks as he scans yet another report without really reading it, there’s no reason he can’t work on both at the same time.

The question that’s about to become urgent is whether or not coming back into contact with a Death Note is going to be harmful. He seems to be at least aware of the issue at the moment, but seeing as his last stint of being unconnected from the Notes ended with him immediately killing with them again, he has no idea if the stagnation would have been solved if he hadn’t done so, or if it reasserted itself as soon as he touched one. If it did immediately reassert itself, then that would imply his current status is connected to something else; most likely the fact that he apparently died and ended up back in time, somehow. Perhaps dying wipes the slate clear as far as these matters go, although that seems doubtful. Something like that doesn’t seem like it should go away so easily. At any rate, the point is that he doesn’t know which is the case, and so he doesn’t know what to plan for.

Should he be trying to derail the investigation and somehow prevent L or the others from ever coming into contact with the Death Note? If so, how is he going to enact any of his other plans? Needing revision or not, he doesn’t plan to just give up his original goals. The only reason he let himself truly reach for them in the first place was because the tool to achieve them was dropped almost literally in his lap; if he deliberately turns his back on that tool, there will be no way to achieve such lofty goals. He can act through proxies if he has to, but he at least needs a Death Note in his possession to get things off the ground. And if he’s going to act through proxies, he’ll definitely need to get Ryuk’s Note back as well.

There doesn’t seem to be much choice; he’ll have to let things go forward as planned and let the team get a hold of Rem’s Note, much as he doesn’t want to see Rem again. Hopefully being aware of the problem will be enough to stave it off. He’ll have to make a habit of examining his own methods and motivations for weaknesses. As long as he doesn’t use the thing again, he should theoretically be fine, and if worst comes to worst and he does need to use it, he has the scrap in his watch and a firm knowledge of the Notes’ ability to interfere with thought processes and memories.

This does raise the question of why the Death Notes cause such stagnation in the first place. But then Light thinks of Ryuk and Rem and the descriptions he’s heard of the Shinigami Realm, and scoffs at himself because of course it’s all riddled with such decay that it infects everything it touches.

Dead things don’t grow.


End file.
